SKINFLINT'S CITY DIARY
There is a severe shortage of large country houses for sale within a hundred miles of London. Demand, for houses of reasonable size exceeding supply even for Victorian monsters, comes from the spate of fortunes made during the last two years in the City. The banks and institutions are after the really big houses formerly thought of as white elephants, but now useful as training places, computer centres and so on.
Lord Chandos thought Trafalgar House, with only six acres, at Downton in Wiltshire would be a drug on the market but it was snapped up for £75,000 by Jeremy Pinckney, who has made money running J. H. Vavasseur, formerly a small East India merchant company but now in the asset-stripping business. Mr Clive Richards, who is on the board of Rothschild Investment Trust, has bought Houndsell Place in East Sussex for over £165,000 against considerable competition. Cohn Forsyth, of the Pan Australian Unit Trust Group, and a director of London and Bombay, has taken responsibility for the architecturally enriched but decaying Dingley Hall in Northampton. Mr William Robinson, the company rejuvenator currently fixing Beyer Peacock, bought Mereworth Castle in Kent a year or so ago for about a quarter of a million, and one of Jack Cotton's sons has spent a fortune rebuilding Tythrop House at Thame in Buckinghamshire, which he bought from Sir Arundell Neave, and which has been ravaged by army occupation during both world wars. The cost of this operation was enormous — he is supposed to have spent £24,000 on a new entrance lodge alone. Dropmore, once Lord Kemsley's house, is for sale again by the American college who bought it and who find it too small. The agents might try, one by one, the chairmen of those companies listed as 'financial trusts' — they will soon strike lucky, without the expense and the delay (due to inevitable trade dispute), of advertising in Country Life.
Royal finances
Those of us who are as determined to stand by the throne against the insolent tribunes of the New Statesman and, come to think of it Tribune, as Mr John Colville are unable to accept his courtier-like estimate of the private royal capital that is income-bearing being as little as £2 million. He is a director of Glyn Mills and must know of the bank in the Strand that has a department, separately staffed, and working under an extra pledge of secrecy, maintaining the royal accounts. He must also know, as a former member of the royal household, of the truth or not of the blocks of New York real estate which are apparently owned by the Royal Family. A few years ago someone (who should have known) pointed these out to me saying that they had been bought by Sir Edward Peacock, when he was a royal adviser, in anticipation of the last war. I am inclined to believe in a huge royal fortune even though Mr Colville sooths our envy by leading us to think that what is splendid cannot be solid.
For those of us who hold our hereditary faith in the monarchy sincerely but with little enthusiasm Mr Colville's dismissal of the royal fortune as being worth no more than four or five garages down the Great West Road is not borne out by the style that the Royal Family supports. Last week I watched the delight of two ladies who themselves maintain a style that we have come to expect only of aristocrats like the Annenbergs, Heinzes and Devonshires. They were pawing over a snapshot album of photos taken illictly during a Windsor house party they attended a year or so ago. Awed giggling sarcasm of "not too bad," "Not as rough as Claridges " indicated that when it comes to looking after her friends the Queen has not departed far from the standard set by her great-grandfather at the turn of the century — and I am glad to hear it in case I am asked.
Two railways to York
British Railways are thinking about a great public relations and advertising campaign directly aimed at the public. They are going, wisely, to advocate far greater expenditure on the railway system instead of motorways and on introducing trains utilising higher technology and the introduction of a mono rail system.
Let's hope Peter Walker will not interfere with his advertising decision in the way the hard anti-British Steel Corporation men on the Conservative benches tried with steel. In the true Parkinsonian tradition they wanted to trim the one part of BSC that is deeply thought successful and they regularly see — its advertising.
We are in a slump and it will be a long while before the so-called dynamic of Europe helps. Keynes writing once on the priming effect of development said, I seem to remember, that unlike the building of the pyramids in ancient Egypt you couldn't nowadays build two railways to York. Thankfully it looks as if we now can and should.
Cold douche
If we go in the British Steel Corporation, with its tirelessly pro-European chairman Lord Melchett and its £100 million loss, will not survive long intact, as maintained by a Senior Conservative in The Spectator last week. The community rules do not allow subvention from the state in these circumstances and up to 250,000 people's jobs will be in peopardy together with the steel companies far greater infra-structure. At the crunch the welfare aspect of staying out appeals to me more than the cold douche theory of entry.
The rich are different
Hugh Leggatt the dealer and self-appointed protector of the nation's old masters (even his pretty secretary is loyal enough to write letters supporting him to the Times from her home address) will be in a quandary over Titian's Death of Acteon finishing up in the safe hands of Mr Paul Getty. Lord Harewood gets 1,600,000 guineas before commission to Christies and Mr Julies Weitzman a tidy £100,000 profit for making the winning bid, infuriating other dealers. Will Mr Leggett disapprove of Mr Getty — plainly a wellregarded anglophile American — who has generously offered to leave the picture in the National Gallery, thereafter swapping it on loan every six months for something from the basement for his Malibu gallery? Mr Getty's strait-thinking may well set a precedent for other welcome exchanges between the major galleries. Absurd chauvinists, such as an unlikely Mr David Hockney, should be comforted, knowing that from time to time there are getting back some good things from the Metropolitan or Mellon collections.
The ease with which Mr Getty spent over £2 million last week reminds me of Scott Fitzgerald's "The rich are different from us." Someone once asked Getty, when I was present, how a friend they knew called Jack Forrester was getting along, to be told, "I've got him in Copenhagen building me a refinery and a harbour."
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